Community blog for Scottish VMUG members

Coommunity Mythbusters

At the recent meeting the Scottish VMUG Leaders introduced everyone to the Coommunity. The leaders encouraged attendees to speak to themselves and other members of the Coommunity (Colin Westwater, Craig Dalrymple and Martin Campbell) about taking part. It was nice to hear that some attendees did take up the challenge and actively seek out the members to talk to.

Here is some info to help bust those myths, for those looking to contribute.

I need to be a triple VCDX etc to be able to contribute.Well if you insist, we’ll see you in a couple of years. Anyone with *any* level of experience or qualifications can contribute. Remember it’s your story/experience you are sharing. Sure there might be existing blog posts or presentations about the same subject, but everyone will have a unique take on how they approached and resolved an issue. Now *that* is worth sharing.

I need to talk about cutting-edge products.

If your day to day job involves working with the latest technologies, then sure go ahead, but not everyone is a Cormac Hogan or Duncan Epping. Do try to remember the “Why” is more important than the “What”, people are more interested in why do something a certain way rather than the technology itself …most of the time anyway. A session on all the shiny kit with bells and whistles is also just as welcome.

My public speaking skills are lacking.

No problem, how about a blog post or two? Blogging is a good way to start out and hopefully with enough encouragement/coaching you’ll soon be ready to make the leap from blogger to a presenter. Every one of the Coomunity is here to offer support and advice. Just reach out to its members. Everyone had to start somewhere, nobody was born a natural presenter.

I don’t feel my content is technical enough.

Your content is your content. It doesn’t have to be a session on building a Highly Scalable SDDC on Hybrid Cloud …not unless you’ve just built a Highly Scalable SDDC on a Hybrid cloud. Sessions/posts subjects can range from introductory sessions i.e. “how to install VCSA” up to a Highly Scalable SDDC, it’s all open for discussion. Sometimes covering the basics, from your perspective, helps others and to solidify your knowledge.

I can only contribute sporadically

Not a problem, most of the contributors are sporadic posters. However, if enough people contribute from time to time, it soon adds up to a considerable Coomunity. It’s also worth bearing in mind you can cross-post from your own blog site.

Top Tips

Use OneNote, Evernote or similar products to take a note of posts/talks you’d like to write/talk about.

It’s ok to use snippets/processes/procedures/code etc from other sites/posts, just make sure you reference their articles/sites in your posts/talks.

Get out of your comfort zone and push yourself to write/present. Going that extra mile will more often than not take you further than a mile.